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Observations from a life in motion

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Feeling: Observations related to feelings

#55: The units of society

I recently attended a wedding where the officiating minister spoke of the importance of the family unit. I’ve heard such words before but this moment felt different. Over the last few years, I have been reflecting on the importance of social structures and the deep and lasting impact of relationships on our lives; I see the clear impact on mine. I’ve faced the repeated loss of loved ones, and after each loss I noticed how my larger family rushed in immediately―like white blood cells―to heal the open wound. These recent experiences merged with my childhood memories of loss and love; of how my family slowly and steadily put my life back on track after the loss of my father. My aunts, uncles and cousins who stepped in with affection, guidance and resources to support my mother, siblings and me. The thousands of contributions that made my life what it is today. They taught me to care and hope; to make real and non-performative emotional bonds and show up for people. My life would’ve taken a very different turn without this family unit. To this day, they cherish my quirks and smallest wins, and offer solace in tough times. No matter what happens in life, I have comfort in the knowledge that I’ll have someone to turn to and they will have me. This is the unit of society that I grew up with: my big family and close friendships, my wolf-pack.

Then like most people, I flew the nest and created more units. I moved between countries and cities, and rebuilt my social units with every move. Close trusted friendships, neighbors, acquaintances, healthcare providers, favorite coffee shops and restaurants where they knew my name and tastes. I created my emotional and practical footprint and brought the wisdom, values and social behaviors of my wolf-pack to my new friendships. Others that encompassed this social footprint did the same and in turn made an imprint on me. Before we knew it, we had formed a subculture of care and belonging that was an amalgam of each of our histories. This is naturally how we humans move through life. We are raised in a social unit, where we learn to bond with and care for others. And over time, we become capable of extending this care to other relationships–friendships, partners, children, coworkers, acquaintances, and even strangers.

We may not realize, however, that our small and seemingly insignificant social units are the building block of society1 and culture2. 

Our small daily interactions create invisible ripple effects on many people and lives, and not just on those that experience our actions directly. How we interact at the gym, during a potluck dinner, while driving, at the watercooler at work, or in the comments section on YouTube can help build or deplete culture and society over the long term. We live in a constant state of osmosis and observe, absorb, react to and repeat one another’s behaviors; the culture we help build turns back around and impacts us in subtle and obvious ways.

We may not realize that we have the power to determine how others experience life and vice versa. That it’s an endless give and take. That it’s important to become intentional about our everyday interactions and the tone we are feeding our own different units of society.

  1. Society: Involves persistent social interaction between individuals and groups that share the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same dominant cultural expectations. Societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions. A given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its members.
  2. Culture: The beliefs, social behaviors, norms and practices of members of a society.

“Society is a dialectic phenomenon in that it is a human product, and nothing but a human product, that yet continuously acts back upon its producer.” ― Peter L. Berger

#54: The container of love

My summer vacations growing up were some of the most memorable times of my life; surrounded by the voices, laughter, and tears of cousins of all ages. My uncle was an esteemed general in the Border Security Force, a part of the Indian armed forces and the largest border guarding force in the world. So every summer, between 7 to 11 kids would descend on the sprawling military campus wherever in the country our uncle was posted. Together we concocted endless escapades that were sometimes fun and sometimes injurious but always memorable.

During these visits, we also got valuable exposure to a mix of Indian cultures and places—the jeep excursions into the rainforests and waterfalls of Shillong, through lush mountains of Jammu & Kashmir, and over desert landscapes of Leh and Bikaner. The farm picnics in Punjab next to gushing tube wells and the endless cold coffees with ice cream. The parties that went late into the night, set to an eclectic mix of music, surrounded by handsome uniformed men with impeccable bearing, and charming women in beautiful saris. Adults with technicolor stories from their saturated, adventure-filled, lives. This only begins to get into the nooks of experiences we had as a pack of kids. Each experience became a cherished lifelong memory and a shared language of connection, a brick in the strong foundation of love upon which our current lives sit.

Then there was this other sad and distressing side to life…when my mom, siblings and I went back home, acutely aware of the gaping hole my father’s death had left in our lives. The sustained psychological and financial impact of losing him weighed us down. The impact that could have completely decimated our lives. But what kept it together is the genuine and lifelong support of family; of my aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins who with their simple everyday acts of warmth created the strongest sea wall that no tsunami of pain could dismantle. With every wave of grief and financial lack that tore at us, they added more stones, more boulders, more cement. No single action might stick out to an observer, they might just note a family hanging out together, but to those of us inside this cocoon of love—especially those marred by grief—these moments of togetherness were profound gifts of care. It’s the stuff you read about in extraordinary tales of love, the stuff they make movies about.

What allowed these actions to germinate was a thoughtfully and lovingly created container. A physical and emotional space that set the ground rules of who was welcome (everybody), how they were treated (like old friends with compassion and generosity), and the tone of everyday life (one of patience, care and adventure). And the people who were instrumental in creating this space for all of us kids were my aunt and uncle, who I started seeing as my second set of parents. My aunt gave me courage and unconditional love, fended off juvenile attacks from my siblings and cousins, and squarely had my back…even when I was the troublemaker. My uncle epitomized courage, sociability and intellectual curiosity—whether about geopolitics, travel or farming. Both were examples of patience and unmatched generosity. Despite the adulation and professional respect he received daily, nobody was too young, old or poor for my uncle to engage with. And while we kids crawled all over his house, he was out there addressing some of the most violent terrorism in the world.

My uncle passed away recently, leaving an enormous legacy of love and impact. Even as our family reverberates with pain, each of us is grateful to have his rare example of care and generosity. There are many generals in the world, but we had our very own Clark Kent with a superhuman combination of strength, integrity, love and humility. We all looked up to him. He was also charismatic and astonishingly handsome. We are blessed to have a first hand blueprint of a very well-lived life. 

Everyone has ancestral lineages, influences and teachings. Mine brim with exemplary love, care and true accompaniment that make a life worth living. Life’s rhythms create busyness and we sometimes forget the nurture that was passed down to us. The last few weeks have brought my family visceral remembrance. No matter where we live in the world, my pack of aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters and nephews have acknowledged my uncle’s container of love in amazingly similar terms. My wish for us is that we embody his traits as we move through life, that we welcome everyone like he did and create a sense of meaningful connection, curiosity and joy wherever we go. That we go on creating more and more containers of love. 

“Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”— Abraham Lincoln

In loving memory of Ravinder Singh Mehta, our real-life Clark Kent.

Seattle, September 2018

#46: Destruction and creation

Destruction is not something we wish for ourselves or our loved ones. The word destruction, understandably, has only negative associations and fills one with dread. It is “the act of destroying something or the fact of being destroyed”, and who wants that! Yet, we experience and participate in destruction throughout our lives― when the work we spent years doing no longer fits us, when the business or life partnership we commited to dissolves, or perhaps when we need to give away our beautiful and thriving plants because they are toxic to our new cat. In case you’re wondering…yes, I adopted a cat named Fern and she has been a destructive force for my routine, focus and décor.

My larger point is that destruction doesn’t always occur in serious and existential ways; and while it may often appear in small ways, the change and adjustment feel difficult. And within this adjustment may lie seeds of creation. As we create our new normal, we exercise parts of ourselves that we hadn’t before and observe aspects we didn’t know existed within us. Despite our best efforts, life changes and old habits, ideas, and structures get dismantled and new ones take shape in their place. We repeatedly engage in this hard dance of destruction and creation. Fern and I are currently engaged in this dance, and our time together has been bewildering and joyful.

“May I feel all I need to feel in order to heal; may I heal all I need to heal in order to feel.”— Marguerite Rigoglioso

Fern

#42: 1324

“Two steps forward, one step back” is a common lament when we feel we aren’t making progress fast enough, especially while trying something new. Since I’m embedded in the newness of several activities, I’ll share some observations from the trenches that I hope will help reframe this phrase.

The path of new isn’t organized like a treadmill on a predictable incline, it is more similar to a hike―with varied terrains, turns, inclines, dips, fallen tree-branches, muddy slopes, and waterfalls with slippery rocks. You can be prepared with maps, equipment and input from others but until you encounter a specific hurdle under specific conditions, you won’t fully know what part of yourself you’ll need to resource. Even with all the preparation, there will be times when you need to pause and take a moment to figure out your next step. These moments are not a loss of momentum; they are more like walking around the circumference of a new roadblock for thoughtful assessment, to understand how you might effectively move forward with grace. These pauses are crucial in being able to continue, otherwise we run the risk of injuring ourselves and needing to opt-out.

The “step back” is not necessarily a slippage, it can be a moment to grasp the bird’s-eye view right before swan diving into the work with gusto.

“All still lies ahead of you…be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

#33: The pain of the moment is not the pain of life

I remember these moments from my teenage years where whatever I was dealing with felt so enormous that I’d be bereft of hope. I recall how intensely I felt that emotion of the moment―abject pain, deep angst, and the many hues in between. Then life continued on and while the emotions may not have been that strong, the internal posture was similar in its tendency to overemphasize the negative. There was always the next thing and then the one after…and then the next one to worry about. And not only was there always something to worry about, the thing that was worrying in the present moment seemed to color everything else in life with its brushstroke. We are sometimes told that life is a roller coaster with breathtaking highs and sudden drops but what we aren’t told is that those drops have a tendency to obstruct joy in the rest of our life. We also forget that a lot of our days are lived at the moderate-speed-completely-manageable ground level of experience. This means self-determination is possible for a big chunk of our life. Then why do the dips spill over to life’s highs and the moderate hums? Why do we color the whole canvas of our existence with the color of pain that we’re experiencing in the moment?

(To be clear: when I say pain, I don’t mean grief and trauma which are a whole different experience, I mean the less jarring dips we face).

While we may be a collection of body parts and lived experiences, we live in this unified animal which is hell-bent on protecting itself from harm in any shape. For our ancestors, being on high-alert for threats was a necessity because those who were more attuned to danger were more likely to survive…you know, they wanted to live! And this programming has been lovingly and evolutionarily handed down to us. It’s what scientists now call negativity bias. It means where something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person’s behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative.  It shows up in our modern lives as not just being more in touch with potential threats, it means that we remember trauma better than joy, insults better than praise, absorb and react more strongly to negative stimuli, ruminate on the rough parts of life; and all this takes space away from the positives. We feel the results of this bias in our relationships and in our decision-making because of how we perceive others and situations. Negative experiences impact our attention by becoming thought-magnets. They take over cognition as we think more about negative events to work out things in our minds. They also impact memory and learning which are direct consequences of attentional processing, i.e. the more attention is devoted to something, the more likely it will be learned and later remembered. In their famous work, Nobel Prize-winning researchers Kahneman and Tversky found that when making decisions, people consistently place greater weight on negative aspects of an event than they do on positive ones so that potential costs are more heavily considered than potential gains.

But worry not fellow humans…now that we know what we are up against, we can hack a solve. 

When we are clutched by our negativity bias, it’s hard to intercept it via a long list of recommendations. And so, I’ve started employing the scientist archetype as a shorthand: curious, patient, open-minded, courageous, collected, and fact-based. So next time, say you have that injury that creates a thought bubble jumping drastically from this little injury to a disabled future, please think like a scientist and reframe. Perhaps the next 10 minutes are better spent on that physical therapy exercise that made you feel stronger, and not on feeding thoughts of an unlikely future of living out the rest of your days in a wheelchair.

And one more thing we’re not told―roller coasters have strong foundations and support beams; as do we. Our roller coaster of emotion sits on top of a very strong internal foundation.

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”― Mark Twain